Czech version of Wikileaks

WikiLeaks has also been made available on hundreds of mirror sites hosted around the world that duplicate the site's content, including at least three in the Czech Republic.

The domain Wikileaks.ch is registered to the Swedish branch of the Pirate Party, an international movement advocating freedom of information and open government.

Jakub Michálek, a board member of Pirate Parties International as well as head of administration for the Czech Pirate Party, told The Prague Post the party is in full support of the WikiLeaks project.

"We strongly believe freedom of the press is a value that deserves protection, and the people should have free access to information. If a situation happens that a server that is a primary source of information for journalists worldwide is attacked, we see it fit the information is copied and distributed to other servers," Michálek said, referring to the party's mirror of Wikileaks on its own website.

It appears that the Czech Pirate Party's attempt to set up its own Wikileaks site isn't going as smoothly as the group hoped. The CPP (Ceska piratska strana) announced the inauguration of its "PirateLeaks" information service earlier this month, to be officially launched on Tuesday. But now the organization says that there will be some delays due to security issues.

The Czech Pirate Party is similar to the Swedish Pirate Party, which advocates for the rights of citizens to share files and publish or access information. The CPP registered as a political entity in June of 2009, and about a year later garnered 0.8 percent of the vote in the Czech Republic's Chamber of Deputies Parliamentary election.

The group has been a big supporter of Wikileaks for quite a while. In May it launched a "pirate copy" of the site—not just a redirect, "but an exact copy, which will be regularly updated," according to a translation of the announcement.

As for establishing its own version of Wikileaks, the CPP describes the project as a "great way to influence regional politics." PirateLeaks will faithfully operate along the Wikileaks methodology—soliciting documents from institutional insiders and getting help from news media in verifying their authenticity.

The big problem, as Michálek sees it, is how to create a portal that protects the identity of sources. And so the party says it will turn to a hosting company owned by the founders of torrent sharing site The Pirate Bay, Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij's PeRiQuito (PRQ).

1 comments:

PirateLeaks aims to publish secret documents from national, regional and local offices as well ministries and wants to cooperate directly with leading news organizations in the same way as Wikileaks does.

It intends to release information important to improve transparency, but will not reveal private details about politicians.